Contents
The Fjord of Evil Winds
Introduction
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Acknowledgments
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About the Author
By the same Author
The Fjord of Evil Winds
The Fjord of Evil Winds
Inspired by the Danish Literary Expedition, 1902-04
by Christoffer Petersen
Introduction
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I have always been fascinated by Arctic exploration and Arctic peoples. As a teenager, and reading into my twenties, I devoured everything I could about the Arctic. Curiously, my Arctic was the wilds of Alaska and Canada. I blame Jack London’s stories, of course. But on meeting my Danish wife, and then moving to Denmark, I discovered a whole other Arctic, drawing me in, deeper and deeper, as I learned the Danish language. When I finished my teacher training, it was clear to me that the only logical choice was to teach in Greenland, thus starting seven exciting years where everything I did, seemed to be for the first time.
Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen is one of the lesser known Polar explorers. I choose to use the word Polar, not Arctic, as I want to include the likes of Sir Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen who are among my favourites – my go to reads. I never really took to Captain Scott, favouring instead the bloody Norwegians. But Shackleton... I think we can all agree that he was a leader of heroic proportions.
Erichsen is different. He was a writer and a poet, and perhaps because of that, I have been drawn to his story. At the age of 30, he led the Danish Literary Expedition to Greenland, 1902-04, from which this story is drawn. My story is fictitious, but with several grains of truth to it, not least that of Erichsen being barred in the attic to write his manuscript before the last ship sailed for Denmark. I have injected much drama and fiction into and around that story, but it is light on history.
This is not a historical story. To learn more about Erichsen, I would encourage interested readers to read the works of Janni Andreassen, although her works are only in Danish at this time. Perhaps this short tale will add a tiny bit of momentum to get more stories about Erichsen translated to other languages.
I intend to write more fictitious stories inspired by Erichsen and his comrades, building up to the dramatic real-life and unexplained death of Erichsen and his Greenlandic guide Jørgen Brønlund, on a dog sledge journey on the Denmark Expedition to Northeast Greenland, 1906-08. But until then, I’ll leave you with this novella-length story about the evil winds that plague a young qajaq paddler, the supernatural element of the written word, and the Arctic magic needed to overcome it.
Chris
April 2020
Denmark
Part 1
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The writing surface of the desk was pitted with the knocks and bumps of a sextant and the points of a pair of dividers, jabbed through the chart when the ship descended a steep wave off the coast of Greenland. The desk had followed its captain into retirement, but whereas he had returned to Denmark, it remained in Greenland, on the west coast, saved from the fate of firewood by three young men, as they bumped it up the stairs and into the church loft, of the granite and wood house belonging to the Royal Greenland Trading Co. in the settlement of Kangamiut, some thirty-two nautical miles from the nearest harbour in Sukkertoppen. Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen pinched the ends of his generous moustache while his expedition comrades toiled, cursed and cajoled the desk into the attic, the heavy feet scraped across the floorboards like clogs on a deck. The three men clapped each other’s shoulders and tramped down the stairs for the chair, a lantern, a stack of paper, twelve bottles of iron gall ink and a heavy fountain pen.
“I should help,” Erichsen said.
The three men ignored him with a chuckle, a wave, and a shake of the head. The last was Knud Rasmussen, Erichsen’s friend and confidant, and the only member of the expedition who could speak Greenlandic. Inquisitive by nature, he matched Erichsen’s passion for exploration with a wary respect for nature. Unlike Erichsen, the expedition leader, Greenlandic blood coursed through Rasmussen’s veins, a wild pulse invigorated by the fresh air of the settlement, laced as it was with a crisp foreshadowing of winter. Rasmussen’s thick black hair barely moved when he shook his head before climbing the stairs, but when he sipped tea outside the house, when the job was done, the wind licked and curled his hair into mares’ tails like the cirrus clouds high above the fjord.
Erichsen served the tea, pressing an enamel mug into each of the men’s hands, thanking Rasmussen, then Moltke, the painter, before dipping his head in another nod of thanks to Bertelsen, the expedition doctor.
“Just be sure to get it finished,” Bertelsen said, as he took the mug from Erichsen. “We won’t let you out before it’s done.”
Moltke laughed, and said, “Food three times a day, and tea as often as you call for it.” He pointed at the tiny window in the loft with the mug’s handle. “If you need a break, you can open the window.”
“But no more than ten minutes,” Rasmussen said. “One of us will be watching.”
“I can’t go outside?”
“No,” they said.
“Not even to piss?”
“There’s a bucket in the loft,” Rasmussen said. He shrugged as he finished his tea. “It’s your own fault. You should have finished it months ago, before we sailed for Greenland.”
Erichsen tried to picture the heaths of Jutland as he drank in the salt-tanged, raw wind blowing whitecaps across the Labrador Sea. The west coast of Denmark was often plagued with high winds and high water. There were comparisons to be made, and yet he must refrain from looking out of the window too often, for fear of exposing his prose to the wilds of Greenland.
“I’ll get it done,” he said, as he pictured their arrival in Kangamiut aboard a skin umiaq, a so-called konebåd, the largest of the Inuit craft, rowed by women. Three swift qajaqs had led the way, the men paddling with a flat paddle held low, just above the round rim of the kayak’s cockpit. The skin of each qajaq was stretched tight over a frame of driftwood, shaped, smoothed, and tied into place with lengths of seal sinew. It was a craft that held no equal, notoriously difficult to master, and yet the Greenlanders paddled it with ease. Erichsen caught Rasmussen by the arm as the men upturned and emptied the last dregs of their mugs. “Tell me again about Ikamiut,” he said, “before I am interned.”
Rasmussen nodded as the painter and the doctor drifted away to carry Moltke’s easel and paints to a spot where he could capture the last of the late light across the fjord.
“I learned a lot after that first dunking in Godthåb,” Rasmussen said.
“But you learned more in Ikamiut?”
“I learned to watch the fjord, to listen to the wind, when to paddle, and when to stay on land.”
“Would you paddle today?”
“Today?” Rasmussen tapped the mug on his thigh as he studied the sea. “A good paddler would make short work of those waves,” he said. He knifed the palm of his hand through the air, conjuring the image of a tiny qajaq in rough water. “Like a knife through butter, quartering the waves.”
“So, you would paddle today,” Erichsen said.
“Me? No.” Rasmussen rolled the edge of his palm and bounced the back of his hand on the crests of the wild water visible in the distance. He laughed. “I would need more than a hot toddy and a cart-load of blankets to survive a dunking today, for I would capsize, sure as not.”
“Then tell me, friend,” Erichsen said. He stubbed the toe of his sealskin kamikker against a st
ubborn poke of rock. “What chance is there then, of my manuscript reaching the last boat for Denmark? What chance that the qajaq man, as swift and as sure that you say he is, will deliver my work safe and dry to Sukkertoppen? What chance?”
“Ah,” Rasmussen said. “That’s a trap.”
“What?”
“You’re looking for an excuse.” He pressed his hands on Erichsen’s shoulders and turned him towards the house, giving him a gentle shove as he laughed.
“Hey.”
“Hey back,” Rasmussen said. “To the loft with you. And not another word until you are finished. Tea is at four, supper at eight, and the light fades at midnight. Away with you,” he said, and gave Erichsen another shove.
“I need to piss.”
“In the bucket. I’ll empty it after supper.”
Erichsen stumbled at the door. He gripped the door frame in his hands.
“I’ll remind you that I am the leader of this expedition.”
“To the loft.”
Rasmussen tossed his mug onto the tough grass beneath the oak bench outside the house. He slipped his hands beneath Erichsen’s armpits and gave him one last push towards the spindly stairs.
“This is mutiny,” Erichsen said.
“I’ll be sure to tell your publisher.”
Rasmussen closed the door, smiling one last time before he shut and locked it. Erichsen turned in the gloom. The light from the loft window lit the stairs and he climbed them, shoving the images of Greenland out his mind with much the same force as his friend had pushed him into the house. The mountains shrank with each step of the stairs, crumbling to dunes spiny with grasses. Only the wind was the same – heavy with salt, it tickled the hairs inside his nose, and he twitched his moustache, just like he would do at home on the heaths of Jutland.
“This might work,” he said, as he entered the church loft, ducking his head as he walked to the desk. He spied the bucket in the corner and laughed at Moltke’s quick sketch of instructions as to how to use the bucket, how to write, and what he could expect if he failed to finish, before the arrival of the Greenlander and his qajaq collecting the last post for Denmark.
“To work then,” Erichsen said.
He dragged the heavy chair across the floor, filled the pen with ink, and sat down to write.
Thoughts of the Greenlander quartering the icy waves in his slim and fragile qajaq, sticking to the shore – close enough to swim to, far enough to avoid the breaking surf, ruptured Erichsen’s train of thought. His muse was gone, replaced by the Greenlander alone at sea, forcing his way through the waves beyond sense or reason to collect a manuscript penned by a foreigner describing foreign shores.
“Different shores,” Erichsen said, his voice caught in the dust and blank spaces of the austere church loft. “And yet, do they not share the same magnitude? Is a death not a death, in any sea, on any body of water, in any waves? Fra gammel tid har alle søfarende frygtet den vestjydske kyst...” The opening line of Erichsen’s previous work, tales of shipwrecks and rescue from the beaches he called home, where all seafaring folk feared the west coast of Jutland. He closed his eyes, picturing the wind blustering through the dune grasses, the sand skimming and swirling across the surface of the beach. The sea surfing onto the sand, spitting gobs of foam into the air, peppering the heath, catching on the tiny barbs of the rushes, sticking between the hairs of the cattle, foaming the herd as they grazed. There is more life roaming the Jutland heath than the Greenlandic mountainside, but the sea here and there is teaming with life, steams of fish. And there are herds too, seals here, cattle there. A crash of similarities, and, finally, a line of words, a sentence, three more, a paragraph and a half page before suppertime.
Rasmussen knocked on the door a few hours later, when the sun circled around the peaks and a shadow settled on the old colonial house. The liver-tang scent of seal meat pressed against the sloped walls of the church loft as he creaked across the floor to Erichsen’s desk.
“Moltke’s light has gone,” Rasmussen said, as he found space among Erichsen’s papers for the supper plate. “Do you need anything else? Ludvig?”
“What?”
Erichsen frowned at the plate, pushing it to one side as he blinked in the low light. Rasmussen lit a lantern, smiling at his friend as the sulphur glow warmed Erichsen’s cheeks.
“I’ll leave you to it,” he said. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet as he left the loft and closed the door.
Erichsen’s moustache twitched as he sniffed at the plate of meat, succulent with a charred surface, black like the sticks burning beneath the flat stone hearth, black like the mud beyond the dunes before the heath, black like the ink seeping into the pores of his skin, tattooing the tips of his fingers like a modern-day Inuit trapped in a church loft. He ate a mouthful, wished, not for the first time, for a slice of fresh rye bread, and chewed, chewing the meat as he chewed the words for heath, and the gypsies that roamed, loved and lived in the place that he called home.
The light flickered and he trimmed the wick.
Moltke brought tea.
Bertelsen brought cake.
Rasmussen checked the bucket, waited outside the door as Erichsen relived himself, and then carried it, quietly, the soft soles of his kamikker shushing across the loft floor like the sand blowing across Erichsen’s beaches.
“You’ll be finished before you know it,” Rasmussen said, when he returned with the empty bucket.
“What?”
“With the manuscript,” he said. “You’re doing well.”
“Hmm.”
The scratch of the nib and his friend’s footfalls pulsed into Erichsen’s thoughts as he scratched another line, a sentence, finished another page. The lantern flickered and he moved it closer, leaning over the page, his nose but a finger length from the ink, the ends of his goatee spidered the last lines of one more page.
Erichsen mumbled a choice collection of words into the gloom as he filled the pen, blotted the spilt ink, trimmed the wick, and pictured the Greenlander paddling along the coastline. Where was he now? Would he stop to rest? Would he light a fire? Where would he sleep? On Jutland’s soft dunes, or in the shadow of a boulder of granite hunched over a tiny fire of parched heather roots?
It didn’t matter.
All that mattered was that he was coming. Soon he would be here, and the manuscript, the collection of stories from a distant land, must be finished.
“I owe it to him, at least,” Erichsen said, as he pressed the nib to the page. “The lone Greenlander, pressing through the waves, from one coast to another, from one time to another, afeared for the sea, and yet bound to it, as are we all.”
Part 2
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More tea arrived sometime after midnight, when the sun circled the higher peaks and a chill descended on Kangamiut. Someone trimmed the wick and added more oil to the lantern, but Erichsen did not notice. His nostrils twitched at the thick, creamy smell of blubber burning in a large bowl shaped from soapstone, more light to write by. But the heaths of home filled his mind, and his thoughts guided and steered the nib of the pen across the thick paper page. Erichsen cursed when the nib scratched dry on the page and he was forced to stop, dip the pipette in the bottle and blot the page, blot the desk, and wipe his fingers. It took time, and, try as he might to hold the thought of the heath, the image of the lone Greenlander – cresting one wave, crashing through the next – captured his imagination. He sipped at the cold tea, hoping the bitter taste of stewed black leaves might place him firmly in the gypsies’ camp, ringed by carts and the huff and snort of horses. But no, he was with the Greenlander and his paltry fire, and there he would stay.
He stood up, placed the pen between the half-finished page and the stack of papers to the right. It was a satisfying sight, and weighty. A wealth of words. His words. Reflections of home, a long way from the fjord.
The floorboards creaked as he walked to the window.
“Ten minutes,�
� Rasmussen had said. “And we will be watching.”
And there they were, on the grass outside. Moltke tamped a fresh plug of tobacco into his pipe, as Rasmussen poked a handful of sticks into the fire. The flame light licked at their faces. Erichsen’s gaze lingered over Bertelsen’s face, as the doctor stared into the flames, lost in the camaraderie of a campfire on a chill night in the shadow of snow-capped mountains.
Rasmussen was the first to break the spell, as he leaned back against a boulder and cast a glance up at the window. He waved and his companions followed his gaze to look at Erichsen. The combined stare and the fire-lit smiles wrenched at Erichsen’s heart. He could see the smoke and the flames but was denied the heat and the acrid taste of smoke on his tongue.
“I’m the expedition leader,” he said, almost shouting when Rasmussen cupped his hand to his ear. “Never mind,” Erichsen said. He waved again and retreated from the window.
The ink had settled. He had to turn the pen, resisting the temptation to shake fresh words out of the nib, for they would only be a jumble, a dialect, something lost to those outside the circle, beyond the camp. But he had supped with the gypsies between the dunes, tasted the crisp skin of fish, newly caught and freshly cooked. The words returned, like the oil Erichsen imagined dripping down his fingers as he pressed soft flaky fish into his mouth. It stuck in his moustache. He remembered that, and wrote as much, describing the nomadic life and familial bond of the gypsy, the comings and goings of the locals along the beach, and the fisherman’s canny eye for subtle shifts of grey – grey cloud, grey sea, grey sky. He wrote of Ringkøbing, his hometown in Denmark, and the thick gunwales of the heavy clinker lifeboats, smooth-hulled, the shallow keels rubbed and nubbed by the sand as the men pushed them into the sea.
Some boats were lost, and men died with an oar in their hands and salt in their eyes.
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